INDIANAPOLIS – Allan Houston was only trying to answer a question, but he didn’t know how true his words rang.
Tuesday, someone asked if the Knicks would want to slow it down in any way against the aging Pacers last night in Game 5 at beautiful Conseco Fieldhouse? Houston had to laugh.
“We never want to slow it down with this lineup,” Houston said of the new QuicKnicks. “We’d be shooting ourselves in the foot.”
Isn’t that the truth. Patrick Ewing’s foot injury has turned out to be exactly what the Knicks needed to get this series back even after losing the first two games, games where Ewing started. This has become the series of the foot.
Last night another chapter was added when the Knicks revealed Larry Johnson is battling foot woes. He has plantar fasciitis of the right foot.
That is the same injury that originally hobbled Ewing and then became a sprained tendon. Johnson was expected to play. Ewing was a game-time decision. When the LJ injury was announced, a Pacer official, who happened to be standing nearby, started laughing.
Can you blame him? Latrell Sprewell is a dynamo with a broken foot. The Pacers might think all this injury stuff is plantar facetious. The more hurt the Knicks get, the better they become as a team.
Ewing only lasted six minutes and 31 seconds before bailing out of Game 2 with his sprained foot. Ewing’s injury enabled the Knicks to open the floor and take off in these playoffs.
They managed to survive in Game 4 without Ewing even tough Sprewell played with a broken bone in his left foot.
The Knicks were leading Game 2, 14-10 and owned a six-point lead in the fourth before running out of gas. That game marked the first time in months they had played the uptempo style that they excelled in last spring against the Pacers.
Imagine if they had been grooming that style for success all season. The Knicks might have run the Heat, who can’t score, right off the floor in five or six games instead of being extended to seven.
Last night was the true test at Conseco, where the Knicks had never won. If the QuicKnicks could pull off a win without Ewing, and Johnson hobbling, then even Jeff Van Gundy, the president of the “We need Patrick” fan club, might have to adjust his thinking.
Van Gundy yesterday referred to thoughts that Ewing should sit as being thoughts of the “ignorant.”
When Houston was asked what Ewing gives the Knicks, this was his answer.
“Patrick gives us a presence on the inside, defensively,” Houston said. “We rely on jump shots a lot of times. What we’ve been able to do is go to the hole more, that’s the reason we’ve been efficient.
“Sometimes when we rely on jump shots, he’s a guy you can throw to in the post. As long as we can keep getting to the basket and attacking, we have to. With a small lineup you can’t rely on jump shots, you have to utilize it somehow, if that means driving to the basket to open things up for us, that’s what we are going to have to do.”
Without Ewing in the middle, there has been more room to operate. Houston hit 17 of his 33 shots in Games 3 and 4 at the Garden. Here at Conseco, Houston has hit 14 of 29 shots.
He has been consistent in the series, shooting .500. Kurt Thomas is shooting .561 – remember he was in Van Gundy’s doghouse earlier in the playoffs – while Johnson is roaring along at .551. Johnson injured his foot in the final minute of Game 4.
For the second straight game at Conseco the Knicks brought some of their own security people with them to protect the area around the bench. They certainly don’t need to protect themselves on the floor.
The Pacers have been as soft a team imaginable. Even in Game 4, when they had Rik Smits to give them a presence in the middle, they started the game by taking wild jump shots. Reggie Miller was pathetic at the start, flopping from 25 feet away from the basket instead of attacking the hoop the way the Knicks did.
Since the Knicks started fronting Smits the past six quarters, Thomas has outscored Smits 20-17 and out-rebounded him 6-2. Smits is terrible when fronted because the guards can’t get him the ball. Often their lob passes are lobbed over everyone’s heads and out of bounds.
Then again, Smits has bad feet, too. Maybe he has trouble getting to those balls. His feet aren’t bad enough to be a Knick.
The Knicks certainly have shown their toughness. Sprewell has drawn admiration from Larry Bird for his toughness.
“He’s a player,” Bird said. “Sprewell is one of those kids, you wake him up at 3 in the morning and ask him if he wants to go play ball, he’s going,” Bird said. “That’s just the way he is. He wants to play.”